KPCB's John Doerr reveals Twitter's Leonardo da Vinci

During our May PandoMonthly event in San Francisco, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers' John Doerr told Sarah that the new currency is engineers, and that Twitter's former Vice President of Engineering, Mike Abbott, is the "Leonardo da Vinci" of this era.

It was during a conversation about how Venture Capitalists can be successful coming into a deal at any stage of a company, that is, if they're good enough.

Doerr believes that VCs never make a lot of money by cutting tough deals with entrepreneurs. He says that the way you build real value is by being ruthlessly honest about where the risk is and working together with the entrepreneur to remove it. And that's what he says investors did with Twitter. He explains how investors rallied together with Twitter's founders to mitigate the risk and how Mike Abbott, who's now with KPCB, played a large role in securing Twitter's survival.